Sourcery

Rincewind.
    “Would you like me to trim your beard?” said Conina, hopefully.
    She stopped, scissors drawn, and stared out to sea.
    “Is there a kind of sailor that uses a canoe with sort of extra bits on the side and a sort of red eye painted on the front and a small sail?” she said.
    “I’ve heard of Klatchian slave pirates,” said Rincewind, “but this is a big boat. I shouldn’t think one of them would dare attack it.”
    “One of them wouldn’t,” said Conina, still staring at the fuzzy area where the sea became the sky, “but these five might.”
    Rincewind peered at the distant haze, and then looked up at the man on watch, who shook his head.
    “Come on,” he chuckled, with all the humor of a blocked drain. “You can’t really see anything out there. Can you?”
    “Ten men in each canoe,” said Conina grimly.
    “Look, a joke’s a joke—”
    “With long curvy swords.”
    “Well, I can’t see a—”
    “—their long and rather dirty hair blowing in the wind—”
    “With split ends, I expect?” said Rincewind sourly.
    “Are you trying to be funny?”
    “Me?”
    “And here’s me without a weapon,” said Conina, sweeping back across the deck. “I bet there isn’t a decent sword anywhere on this boat.”
    “Never mind. Perhaps they’ve just come for a quick shampoo.”
    While Conina rummaged frantically in her pack Rincewind sidled over to the Archchancellor’s hatbox and cautiously raised the lid.
    “There’s nothing out there, is there?” he asked.
    How should I know? Put me on .
    “What? On my head?”
    Good grief .
    “But I’m not an Archchancellor!” said Rincewind. “I mean, I’ve heard of cool-headed, but—”
    I need to use your eyes. Now put me on. On your head .
    “Um.”
    Trust me .
    Rincewind couldn’t disobey. He gingerly removed his battered gray hat, looked longingly at its disheveled star, and lifted the Archchancellor’s hat out of its box. It felt rather heavier than he’d expected. The octarines around the crown were glowing faintly.
    He lowered it carefully onto his new hairstyle, clutching the brim tightly in case he felt the first icy chill.
    In fact he simply felt incredibly light. And there was a feeling of great knowledge and power—not actually present, but just, mentally speaking, on the tip of his metaphorical tongue.
    Odd scraps of memory flickered across his mind, and they weren’t any memories he remembered remembering before. He probed gently, as one touches a hollow tooth with the tongue, and there they were—
    Two hundred dead Archchancellors, dwindling into the leaden, freezing past, one behind the other, watched him with blank gray eyes.
    That’s why it’s so cold, he told himself, the warmth seeps into the dead world. Oh, no…
    When the hat spoke, he saw two hundred pairs of pale lips move.
    Who are you?
    Rincewind, thought Rincewind. And in the inner recesses of his head he tried to think privately to himself…help.
    He felt his knees begin to buckle under the weight of centuries.
    What’s it like, being dead? he thought.
    Death is but a sleep , said the dead mages.
    But what does it feel like? Rincewind thought.
    You will have an unrivalled chance to find out when those war canoes get here, Rincewind .
    With a yelp of terror he thrust upwards and forced the hat off his head. Real life and sound flooded back in, but since someone was frantically banging a gong very close to his ear this was not much of an improvement. The canoes were visible to everyone now, cutting through the water with an eerie silence. Those black-clad figures manning the paddles should have been whooping and screaming; it wouldn’t have made it any better, but it would have seemed more appropriate. The silence bespoke an unpleasant air of purpose.
    “Gods, that was awful,” he said. “Mind you, so is this.”
    Crew members scurried across the deck, cutlasses in hand. Conina tapped Rincewind on the shoulder.
    “They’ll try to take us alive,” she said.
    “Oh,” said Rincewind weakly. “Good.”
    Then he remembered something else about Klatchian slavers, and his throat went dry.
    “You’ll—you’ll be the one they’ll be after,” he said. “I’ve heard about what they do—”
    “Should I know?” said Conina. To Rincewind’s horror she didn’t appear to have found a weapon.
    “They’ll throw you in a seraglio!”
    She shrugged. “Could be worse.”
    “But it’s got all these spikes and when they shut the door—”